


Staying the Nights

by jin_bestgirl



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Universe, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Love Confessions, M/M, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:54:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26673223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jin_bestgirl/pseuds/jin_bestgirl
Summary: “Each time they loosen more, grow more casual, kicking boots from their feet and shrugging shirts over their heads until they’re left in their underclothes, climbing in beside each other like it’s natural, closing the gap in the space between them in the bed without talking about it, always without talking.“Four times Levi stays the night with Erwin and the feelings that come with them.
Relationships: Levi/Erwin Smith
Comments: 64
Kudos: 493





	Staying the Nights

“and  
we need so much  
if we only knew  
what it  
was.”

\- Charles Bukowski

1\. By Accident

  


The first time Levi stays the night with Erwin it is not his intention. 

  


They had brought Erwin in just as the dazzle outside was dimming to dust-dark, the sun slipping away past the distant hills and leaving behind the mess the day had brought upon them. The bustling crowd of bodies draped in white robes had demanded solitude in the room, ushering out the soldiers who had carried Erwin here as quickly as they had been hurried in. One of the nurses had turned to Levi- a fawn-like girl with eyes unmarred by travesty- and she had opened her mouth at him as if to begin to suggest his leaving, too. She had taken one look at the expression on his face and closed her mouth again, and so came and went the only attempt to get him out of the room.  


And so Levi had stayed, back and out of the way of the frantic paths seared into the ground by the physicians, the manic patterns of people grasping at straws, unconvincing in each shaky assurance that somebody here knew what he or she was doing. Levi hadn’t trembled like them; he hadn’t moved erratically, asked questions. He had stood there, perched there in the corner of the room, gray eyes boring through the blurred mess of activity, locking instead onto Erwin’s slack face. Nothing had moved him enough to draw his attention away from it.  


Marble-like, Erwin had laid out like an ancient hero, stone-cast. Serenity sunk itself into the slope of his nose, the cutting angles of his jaw, his chin. He looks like he’s sleeping, someone had said at some point in a lilted voice, maybe a doctor, maybe a nurse; an idiot. Erwin’s long eyelashes had not fluttered once, the tone and color had abandoned his face, his golden hair seemed pallid and sickly and his heavy eyebrows laid still, released from the burden of jerking up to question Levi, down to tease him. He looked dead, not asleep, and in all the time they buzzed around his body and fixated on the stump of his arm, Levi’s steady gaze had remained there on the once-familiar face, unable to blink away until he found some semblance of the man he had known there.  


Slowly, like the life leaving an after-midnight party, the hum in the room had begun to die off as people were rendered extraneous by Erwin’s apparent stability. First went the interns, who had carried around wet metal pots and long iron instruments, extracted ruined bandages and then more ruined bandages once the first sets were saturated to dripping with Erwin’s dark blood. Then went the doctor who had stitched him up for hours, a bone-weary looking man who seemed like he might collapse to the floor himself at any moment, cottony hair spurting from his head in tufts, rubbing a handkerchief over his shining forehead again and again. Then left the tall woman in the sweeping robes with her bloody gloves and stern expression, trailed by the fawn-like nurse with her saucery eyes, open and exposed and ready to be taken by the swift and punishing hand of the natural order of things. The surgeon had said something to Levi as she swished past, something about affirming permission for him to stay as if any decision otherwise would have had any effect, had explained to him who to call or what to do if Erwin began to seize and assured him someone would be by to check up as if he didn’t already know. Finally she had remarked that Levi could leave whenever he wanted, and left with the girl. He hadn’t even granted her a glance.  


Levi had watched them all go with a set jaw and impassive eyes and these women had been the last, until the once bright and frenetic room had become a silent, candle-lit tomb. Levi had stood, stock still in the corner, held up by aching legs he had ignored, muscles straining with the toll of a day’s fighting and evening standing. He had remained there, arms folded tightly across his chest and the muscles of his back pressing into the corner, breathing steadily and staring, staring across at what looked like a dead body. Erwin’s face was still marbelesque but it was stable, and it had been then that Levi had finally considered the arm, eyes flickering to the stump of Erwin’s shoulder like an afterthought, as if he’d only just realized it was gone.  


At some point Levi had found himself at the foot of the bed, after drifting across the space of the room like a phantom, lost. He had stared down his nose at the broken pieces of Erwin Smith, his commander, and something had twinged hard in his chest, like a string springing off of a guitar. He had clutched the wood of the bed frame as if he had been struck, and had swallowed hard and found that it hurt. Stepping closer, one knee bumping the edge of the bed near Erwin’s remaining elbow, Levi had bitten down on the inside of his lip until came the tang of blood, a bitter warning to stop himself from closing the rest of the distance and touching Erwin’s face, from holding the stiff body close and pressing himself into it just to catch a sacred moment of Erwin’s familiar scent, to feel the steady pound of the heart hidden away past the bandages, to prove for himself, because a hundred physicians were not enough, that Erwin was alive.  


He had touched him then, brief and quick, fingertips brushing the soft material of Erwin’s infirmary gown to find warmth underneath, and it is then Levi had realized there was no need to feel Erwin’s heartbeat because this was enough, it was enough to press his fingers against his commander’s chest until it rose to met him with Erwin’s shallow breath. Levi had changed his own breathing, standing there tense and straight, touching Erwin and closing his eyes and feeling him prove again and again, with each passing second, that he was alive.  
And then Levi had retreated back to his corner, back to the hard, simply-built chair that had been there the whole time, untouched but waiting for him, as if it had known this moment would come, that Levi would find his way there eventually and settle into it.  


He had swept his cape back and sat himself down into the chair, jerking the feet so that it faced Erwin, not the opposite wall, and tilted back until the backboard of it pressed into his back in the same way the wall had done hours before, days before, years before maybe; he couldn’t remember a time before he was here. He had blinked at Erwin’s shape in the brown half light until the weight of sleep began to toy with him, blurring the edges of his thoughts, blurring Erwin’s form until it became one with the wall and Levi was forced inward, to hold Erwin’s face in his mind instead. It was with this new control that Levi opened Erwin’s eyes, looked into the clear blue in his mind and silently contemplated the way he would never take Erwin’s open eyes for granted again. 

Levi wakes with the sickening lurch of a fall, limbs jerking in an instinctive desperation to catch himself, breathless with the sharp streak of panic. Blinking burning eyes into the dim pale of the morning, a dull ache stretches awake in his neck, climbing up one side like ivy and sinking its claws into the start of his shoulder. A sister of the sensation blooms in his left hip, extending halfway up his back and creeping down the side of his ass and he knits his eyebrows against the pain, stretching a leg out experimentally and finding it a valueless exercise. His mouth is dry and his throat tight, and he draws a deep breath of clean air through his nose.  


Levi shifts in the unyielding arms of the chair, which creaks in half-hearted protest, and the room pieces itself together before him. It’s soft and unfocused, swirls of dust dancing in the shafts of lemon light that slip through the windows, between the curtains. A hitch in his chest reminds him of the reason he is sitting here and he turns his head, half-anticipating to find the clarity of blue waiting for him, the twinge of bow-shaped lips and the twitch of thick eyebrows.  


Erwin is as he was last night, as he had been when they had carried him in. He lies in the pooling sunlight like a mummy, like a felled king, clad in white, oblivious to the way the dust swirls or the day has changed, or to the way his second in command sits across the room with tight joints and a weak head, staring at him with burning eyes, like he has never wanted to look at anything else.  


Levi stands suddenly and the motion sets off blooms of strain across his body that he ignores, sweeping hands crisply down his front and straightening out his necktie as his mind begins to clear with the demands pocketed by the hell of yesterday. He couldn’t care less who knows he had slept here but it is time to go; he can feel from here the way Hange is ransacking his office in an attempt to locate him, morning briefings clutched tightly in their hand. As he slides the chair back into its original place Levi glances to Erwin once more, as if the commander might have found his way to consciousness some time in the last thirty seconds.  


Levi leaves when he can no longer justify this lingering- hanging onto the silence and breathing in step with Erwin, studying his face from across the room as if it doesn’t already live in his head most days. He doesn’t look back as he pulls the door quietly closed behind him- he can muster enough will for that- but as he sets wearily toward the day and begins to pull himself back, to hone himself back into the shape of a captain, he leaves his heart behind in Erwin’s room; he’s lost it there anyway. 

2\. For Duty

  


“That’s enough for tonight.” 

  


Erwin sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose high and closing his eyes for a moment. Levi watches him from the bookcase, pen pressed between his fingers, caught halfway through an absent-minded twirl. His eyebrows twitch once in an aborted frown and his gaze falls to the scattering of papers strewn across Erwin’s tabletop, letters deemed not good enough crunched into balls around the edges and cascaded to the floor. The candle burns low, the wax dripping off the tin base and onto the mahogany of the desk, casting brown, dull light that gilds the details of Erwin’s tired face. The office is bleary and so are they, tense and aching under the cool gaze of the moon out the window behind the commander’s chair.  


“I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” drawls Levi, replacing the pen on the shelf he had unconsciously plucked it from at some point in the past ten minutes. His eyes burn hot and weary and his joint strain with each movement, bones sick of pacing. There’s a chair by the door but he has always found himself unable to stay in it for long when the heat of discussion is swirling around the room; he swirls with it, stalking back and forth and reflecting thoughts back at Erwin as they are cast to him, edging Erwin along the paths he seeks and sliding into his mind with fresh options when the commander has run out of them.  


“I thought I could manage a few more but my eyes won’t focus on the paper,” Erwin sighs again, and he stretches back against the chair, sweeping his hand through the blonde mess of his hair. It’s fallen out of its perfect form into a style marked by exhaustion, and Levi thinks privately that by the looks of it Erwin might have just fought a battle. The stack of letters waits patiently at the edge of his desk, grim and quiet and ready to be delivered to grief-stricken fathers and empty mothers, Erwin’s neat scrawl serving as officialization of the deaths of their children, their babies. Levi has written his fair share of condolence letters and has found he can manage a steady pace of productivity once he shuts his heart out from the matter, but Erwin has always had a harder time with this. He thinks too hard about the words he chooses, teeters for too long around the specificity of prose, the angle of his hand against the page. He also refuses Levi’s assistance when it is periodically offered, insisting that it was he who had watched them go down, he who had given the commands, and therefore must be he, now, who writes their deaths into tangibility.  


Writing is more difficult now. Before the injury Levi had dipped into Erwin’s office perhaps once a week for an hour at a time, for status reports and the casual exchange of information. Now with Erwin a week out of the infirmary, this has been the nightly ritual- the two of them in Erwin’s office until near dawn, Levi watching with a pained expression as Erwin struggles to hold the paper steady with the side of his hand as he twitches his fingers to write. More than once Levi, unable to so idly watch the struggle, has stalked silently over and pressed the page down with his fingertips to fix it in place while Erwin continues to scratch out apologies. Erwin always mutters a soft thank you, though Levi does not need or expect it.  


They both stretch now, Levi tilting his neck into the thick darkness. Everything feels heavy. It’s near dawn already; the sky outside has begun to color with the dusty hint of light, mingled in with the ink black of the night. He considers, as he tugs lazily at his necktie, staying up through the night. It is not an unfamiliar practice, to slip from day to day without closing his eyes. He’s swaying now but he will steady when duty demands it, he will harden to the weakness until it is too far away to feel. The thought of pressing through until morning is a less than thrilling prospect but it is far from grueling; this is no longer the type of thing that can bring him to his knees.  


“Same time tomorrow?” Levi quips, and Erwin huffs out his nose, half a laugh, half an affirmation. Levi watches as he swipes a hand down his face again and pushes himself to stand, the vacant sleeve of his right arm swaying at his side. He’s still bandaged under there but insists on wearing his uniform anyway, driven by a ridiculous sense of dignity. Levi had rolled his eyes at Erwin’s persistence, but privately he had respected it, admired Erwin’s brand of fuck you to the universe, though not in so many words, not in any words at all.  


Levi tugs his cloak from the back of the chair, resisting the weight of exhaustion that presses into him. It’s not a particularly long way back to his quarters but he struggles against the thought of the trip anyway. Maybe he won’t sleep, perhaps instead he will pace, will continue to walk around himself until he drives his busy mind to silence long enough to watch the sun rise through his window without the shadows of dead soldiers to color his thoughts. He starts toward the door.  


Levi is clasping the metal around his neck, fastening it in place and reaching for the knob when Erwin speaks behind him, simple words that ensnare Levi to the spot.  


“You know you can stay, Levi. If you want. It’s late.”  


Levi’s fingers brush the brass of the knob and then he turns with appraising eyes, heart quickening in his chest in a hitched way he knows Erwin can’t sense; not even Erwin is keen enough to pierce through the veil of Levi’s projected indifference, false as it is.  


“Here?” Levi prompts without assumption, casting the responsibility for this moment back to Erwin, dodging the offer and tossing it back, challenging in the way his eyes narrow and his eyebrows twitch towards each other, _say it again if you mean it. _Levi is in no state to answer now in any sense, because Erwin cannot mean what he thinks he means.  
__

____

____

“Here,” Erwin echoes then, in impossible affirmation, and Levi watches in stock-stillness as Erwin crosses to the far side of the room where his bunk sits pressed against the wall, pulls back the thick covers and toussels the pillow with his fingertips. Levi watches him from the doorway still, waiting for something else to happen, for some other words to be said. It can’t be his turn yet, or if it is, he can’t bring himself to say anything. He isn’t ready to affirm and he isn’t ready to deny. He hovers there and waits for Erwin to press again, to expose himself so wholly that Levi cannot be mistaken in accepting this offer. When Erwin continues he keeps his eyes trained on the bed this time, as if suddenly aware of what’s already escaped his mouth.  


“It’s not the largest bed but I don’t want you to waste the time you could be sleeping finding your way back to yours. ...It’s the least I can do to thank you for all this extra help,” Erwin remarks, finally leveling his clear gaze with Levi’s again. It’s still in the room, and Levi urges himself to speak but his mind is barren. It isn’t until Erwin speaks again, tone lightened and the twitch of a smile on his lips, that Levi breaks out of the hold of the moment.  


“This isn’t an order, Levi.”  


Levi blinks and clears his throat impatiently, sighs, and tosses his cloak back over the share with a practiced facade of insouciance. His heart hammers hard in his chest in a way he resents, and he swipes a hand through his hair as it curtains back over his forehead.  


“The least you can do, actually, is finish working an hour earlier next time,” he drones, but he crosses towards Erwin through the dim light anyway, and Erwin is smiling, small.  


Levi waits for Erwin to start to move, mind alert as in battle, honed in, observing. It isn’t until Erwin begins to loosen his own necktie, slip out of his boots, that Levi does the same, moving through molasses, through staggering disbelief, disrobing to his long-sleeved undershirt as though they have always done this in front of each other, kicking off his boots but leaving the thick belt wrapped around his waist because he doesn’t dare, and he knows Erwin doesn’t dare invite him. The line has shifted but it still exists, sitting untouched in the distance, and Levi will not take a single step closer.  


When Erwin climbs under the covers with a creak he pushes himself over to the far side, until his arm brushes the wall, making room for Levi though he doesn't look at him, as if that might be a bit too much, a bit too far, as if making eye contact one more time might change Levi’s mind.  


It is wordlessly that Levi climbs in, feigning indifference about this, slipping his legs into the covers as if this is his room, his mattress. The frame creaks again into the space, announcing his arrival in his commander’s bed, and Levi grimaces with it. His head settles against the harsh metal of the headboard and sits there, blinking into the dark. It’s ridiculous, and he suddenly burns with the stupidity of it. They sit with an abyss between them, a stretch of careful miles, like nervous kids at a sleepover. Erwin’s scent, known to Levi in the slightest coloring of the air that shifts subtly past him when Erwin walks by, is now everywhere, everything. Dark and husky, clean and sharp, it settles around Levi to claim him, as if to remind him with each slipping second of where he is and how he feels about being here.  


“Goodnight, Levi,” Erwin bids from a few feet away, and Levi sinks back against the headboard, the weariness bleeding into his core to replace the apprehension. Still too tense to move freely, his fingers find a handful of blanket at his side.  


“Mhm,” he replies, and forces his eyes closed, forces his mind away from the too-far yet too-close shape of Erwin, forces his heart to steady and his fantasies away, away, away from this place because they are too dangerous to be allowed to live when Erwin is so close. Levi sinks into sleep like this, strained with apprehension and thinking without warrant of Erwin’s body tucked away under the blanket they share.

Sometime later Levi’s mind stirs awake, flickering into consciousness like the birth of a flame, young and confused but here now. He blinks his eyes open but it is black, and for a long moment he is unsure of when they are open and when they are not.  


He is no longer pressed against the headboard of the bed, and for a spiraling moment his body seems to float suspended, neither vertical nor horizontal but caught somewhere vague and intangible. His limbs are leaden and when he twitches his foot it feels too far away to be attached. A weight, firm and warm, presses across his chest and with a staggering, breathless kind of ache he comes to understand it to be Erwin’s arm.  


As if he has unlocked the complete picture in realizing this, everything pieces itself together around him, swirling into place as he lies there and breathes. He has slipped down the headboard and angled, despite himself, towards Erwin, drawn in dreams to the comforting warmth of the other body in the bed. Levi does not sleep on his back and he does not sleep carelessly; he is as drawn into himself as when he sleeps alone, legs pulled up and arms sloped around himself, but now there is a new arm, the only one Erwin has now, held out and pressed down across Levi as if to shield him from some outside threat. Levi flexes the fingers of his left hand and catches the soft skin of Erwin’s forearm, grazes the soft hair there. His breath comes irregularly, as though his lungs are afraid they might suddenly wake Erwin with the movement like Erwin hasn’t been draped across him like this in sleep this whole time. When had they tangled together like this? Minutes ago? Hours?  


Time is amorphous and irrelevant as Levi lies there, immobile, listening to Erwin’s ragged but steady breathing. From where his head tilts against the pillow he can make out the ridges of Erwin’s profile, a different black against the black of the window behind him, and he stares without thought or agenda, memorizing in a private way the slope of Erwin’s strong nose and the gentleness of his features when he is like this, his most relaxed.  


Something vulnerable and terrified bleeds into him, cagey and timorous, and against his better instincts he lets it, waiting there as it comes, raw and sensitive in the center of him. A tug of emotion, a pull toward tenderness that has almost grown unrecognizable in the time it's been missing from him finds him again, pulled at long last to his surface by the shape of Erwin’s lips in the dark.  


Levi’s knuckles brush against Erwin’s arm again, and he presses them up this time with surgical care, presses until the contact shifts from the realm of ephemeral to something deliberate, unapologetic. Erwin sighs in sleep and Levi breathes in with him, deep and reactionary, as if Erwin’s breath is his own.  


Levi is unmoored, balancing delicately between the realm of the known and the chasm of the dreamed up, teetering on the edge with less care than he should. Were the hour reversed and light shifting through the window, were they both awake and were he well-rested, had Erwin not only just recovered from the rim of death, Levi would draw into himself now, extract himself from this indefinite place, slip from Erwin’s hold and maybe even silently out the door, and he considers this distant thought, the sobering truth of things. He thinks distantly that perhaps this had been the reason he had not moved into the space Erwin had made for him as they had drifted to sleep, that he had known then as he understands now that a touch would be the death of control, the loss of formality, but they had found their way here in their sleep anyway, had trapped themselves in their dreams, and against all sense and dignity Levi is grateful for it.  


Recklessly he presses his knuckles upwards again, stroking the soft skin of Erwin’s arm with the backs of his fingers until he can elicit another breath, until Erwin begins to shift, breaking through a layer of sleep in a way that makes Levi’s heart skip into his throat and flutter there, alive and vulnerable. It’s intoxicating and Levi leans into it, constitution slipping further still. The alien emotion tugs again at him, pulsing in the base of his throat like his heartbeat and pressing into his chest.  


Erwin comes to life beside Levi and the charm shatters, reality hardening around the mystic of the moment. Levi watches with a drop of panic as the silhouette of Erwin’s long eyelashes flutter where they face the ceiling, heart hammering strange patterns into his chest. For a moment he considers pretending to sleep but his smart mind can’t decide quickly enough and now it’s too late for it; Erwin’s arm shifts against him, bending a little at the elbow, skirting against Levi’s fingertips as it withdraws itself and leaves a burning path in its wake. Levi braces himself for the disappointment of losing their contact but it comes anyway as the press of Erwin’s arm lifts from Levi’s chest.  


Erwin shifts again and turns his head, blinking awake and finding Levi’s eyes through the dark, and a new species of feeling flowers in Levi, something dangerous and thrilling and uncharted. He watches from inches away as the same ticks of revelation he had experienced click into place in Erwin’s eyes, as Erwin’s breathing too becomes ragged with the returning of awareness, as his limbs return to his command in the same way Levi had been forced to rediscover his own.  


"I’m sorry,” Erwin murmurs, exactly the way Levi is expecting him to. His voice is thick with sleep but Levi can still sense the burn below it, he can recognize the flame of embarrassment in Erwin, unbecoming framed by his unapologetic reputation. Sorry is for the soldiers they send to die, for the parents of dead children they write to; sorry is never from them to each other.  


“No,” Levi contends without considering the word too much. He runs his tongue out against his lip and frowns into the black, and the shape of Erwin hesitates in its turning away. Levi breathes in a calculated way, methodology used to steel himself against titans turned for new use.  


Erwin is frozen, still close enough that their legs glance together under the covers and their shoulders keep quiet contact. Levi breathes in the scent of him, heady colors of musky aftershave and sharp spearmint of toothpaste, these familiar tones mingling with the lingering notes of hospitalized hygiene. Erwin is still warm, though they only touch now at odds and ends. He speaks the simple truth into the space between them because it is that, the simple truth, and something wild and strong tugs at his heart as the words leave his mind to find Erwin in the dark.  


“Reminds me you’re alive.”  


He can hear through the dark the way the cogs of Erwin’s brilliant mind click steadily against each other, calculations processing, words being decoded, risks being weighed. They lie there in the dark together and Erwin breathes and Levi breathes and it’s all there is for a long, suspended moment. And then, with the care of a commander, Erwin replaces his arm back across Levi’s chest, the weight steady but uncertain in the way the muscles tense beneath the skin, the way he touches Levi without pressing, the way his hesitancy asks again though he already has asked with his words, is this okay?  


Levi’s response comes in the same silent language, reaching up and gripping Erwin’s wrist before he can recall the reasons not to. His fingers press into skin softer than expected, thumb brushing against the tender place under Erwin’s wrist, rolling the pad of it gently against the corded tendon that disappears into the shape of Erwin’s hand. Levi reels against the contact, dizzy and breathless, and Erwin shifts until his hand presses warmly into the center of Levi’s chest.  


The instinct to self-stabilize is overwhelming, a panicked, battletime impulse jerking Levi toward pretense; calm your breathing, slow your heart rate, because he cannot know what this does to you. It overtakes him, drowns him, and then, with immeasurably difficulty, he lets it go.  


He leans into the codes of his body instead, gives way to the aching in his heart, and he breathes how he wants to breathe, quick and shallow and uncertain, chest pushing into Erwin’s palm with each intake, pressing the undeniable message there over and over, _you are affecting me like this, you are making me forget how to breathe, do you feel it? _  
__

____

____

Erwin breathes deep beside him and a moment of indignance flickers to life in Levi, and sudden regret, for exposing himself so nakedly while Erwin lies there shielded from view and understanding. He is quiet and Levi can feel the turning of the cogs again, the consideration of what it means to touch Levi like this and what it means that Levi lets him, and he keeps his breathing steady and his heart rate to himself. But he does not move his hand from Levi’s hammering heart, and perhaps that is disclosure enough.  


They drift to sleep again like this, once Levi has found a way to breathe through the touch and to settle his roaring mind enough to focus on the feeling, not the implications or the unspoken complexities of whatever this is, but the simple feeling- Erwin’s warm hand against his cotton-covered chest, his own fingers wrapped around Erwin’s wrist, the quiet pounding in his ears, the dark on his eyes, the lulling rhythm of his commander’s deep breaths beside him. Levi submits to the heaviness of sleep and the frustration that accompanies the way he has suddenly forgotten how to hide from this. 

3\. Through Pretense

  


Levi doesn’t need to be here. 

  


It’s a truth that hangs there in the air around them, heavy and dangerous and obvious, above all- obvious yet untouched by either of them.  
Erwin has recovered so completely it’s embarrassing, functioning nearly as well as he ever had, yet here Levi is in his office hours past sundown, hanging on invented reasoning and flimsy justifications. He has allowed this to happen in the way he continuously tells himself it’s not happening, the ways he pretends to act under duty, out of obligation; pure bullshit. Erwin is no longer helpless, if he ever was, and Levi is certainly not obligated.  


He’s slept in Erwin’s bed four times now under the lazy pretense of necessity. The circumstances demand explanation but neither of them bring it up, maybe because neither can think up a good enough excuse. Levi doesn’t retire to his office and Erwin doesn’t ask him to, though they’ve begun to work on tasks independently of each other, scribbling notes and letters and documents on opposite ends of the room like they’re constrained by a need to be there, like it isn’t clear what’s happening here.  


Levi works now in the simmering glow of low candlelight, pressed into the corner with his hard eyes skimming across jumbled words, sat there like if he grows small enough they might both forget he’s in the wrong place until the wick has fizzled low and the only option is another night in Erwin’s room.  


It’s like alcohol, warm and intoxicating and dangerous. Until a month ago Levi hadn’t slept well in years but the four nights he’s spent here have broken the stasis of insomnia. Erwin’s breathing next to him, the warmth radiating from him, the security of his twitching legs shuffling slowly under the blankets and the creak when he shifts in sleep; Levi has grown acclimated too quickly and now his own bed is cold and unfamiliar, sleep more a stranger than ever there. It waits for him instead in Erwin’s room- _you can catch me but only here, I am not coming home with you anymore. _  
__

____

____

He doesn’t tell Erwin this, of course, there are no words to explain and if there were he wouldn’t deign to utter them. Levi is a private sufferer, a stoic model of indifference, and he will not break for this, nor will he change the way he has always been because the shape of Erwin in the dark calls him to. It is possible to suffer without ever succumbing to it- this is what he recites every waking moment, every drifting night. This kind of pain is nothing compared to the travesties that have wracked his life, and if he gives into anything, this will be the last.  


“It’s getting late,” Erwin suggests to the room. This is code, and they are becoming fluent.  


They have approached the mark they always do, the moment of truth, the time to make or break the night. Levi does not decide, because to decide is to stretch himself to the line. It is Erwin’s room and Erwin’s call and Erwin’s dignity at stake in case things go wrong, in case something about what they are doing is finally put into words, forced into exposure. Levi never takes both eyes off the path to retreat, even as he climbs into bed alongside Erwin each night.  


Erwin’s pronouncement hangs waiting in the air for a moment before he adds to it, not even looking at Levi as he shuffles papers together, sorts them into stacks to be dealt with tomorrow, or later still.  


“You should stay.”  


Smooth relief lurches jagged through Levi and he resents it, the strength of it, the weakness.  


“Okay,” he concedes like it’s a decision he’s had to make, flexing his fingers and standing, speaking just enough to fulfill his part of the bargain; to consent.  


He’s become too aware of Erwin. Erwin has always pulled his focus in a room but not like this, never in this way. Levi can detect the color of Erwin’s emotions from the patterns of his breathing now, and when he glances long enough to catch the flutter of Erwin’s blonde eyelashes he can study the nuances in the twitch of the commander’s eyebrows, decoding the language they’re speaking. Erwin’s gestures and movements, habits and tendencies make up a language Levi has always known, but never like this.  


They begin the ritual that is beginning to solidify into something scripted; each time it grows stronger, settles into something increasingly stable, alarmingly ceremonious. Each time they loosen more, grow more casual, kicking boots from their feet and shrugging shirts over their heads until they’re left in their underclothes, climbing in beside each other like it’s natural, closing the gap in the space between them in the bed without talking about it, always without talking.  


The bed creaks as they climb in tonight, one after another, filing in like stupid little boys. Levi blows out the candle on the desk before he does, casting them into the swallowing dark. Erwin’s blankets are scratchy and familiar, his scent on them strong and assuring. Levi is in danger.  


Now comes the part of the ritual in which Levi admires Erwin privately, perhaps in the most private part of his mind, where something like indignity lives but is allowed to live because it is too far out of sight to be found out. He has already burned into memory the angles of Erwin’s profile in the dark, the patterns of his breathing, the way his shoulder twitches when he slips in and out of sleep. Levi never falls first. He waits until Erwin is gone before following, maybe because he needs to study Erwin before he goes, maybe because he needs to make sure he isn’t being studied in the same way.  


It takes some time tonight, but once Erwin’s breathing slows and his body goes limp Levi lets go, lets himself fall back into the weight of the exhaustion, finally overwhelming him, safe from Erwin’s careful eye, safe from the possibility of being watched and the danger of hoping he might be.

  


“Levi… Levi-!”  


A strong grip presses into Levi’s shoulder, shaking gently, then less so. Levi gasps in a breath and jerks awake, and immediately everything is off, wrong. His heart flutters too high in his chest and his throat is clenched and struggling for air. Sickness pools in his stomach and dizziness in his head and he’s sweating, cold and damp in his nightshirt. The pieces of his surroundings swim together without his help, patching together a picture of him on his back, one knee bent up, hands clutched around himself, and Erwin’s strong arm branching across the space between them, grasping Levi’s shoulder, holding him still.  


Mortification. It creeps into him slowly, insidious, poisoning him from chest out until it reaches the ends of his fingers, the tips of his toes. It is staggering.  


“Are you alright?” Erwin prompts through the dark, worsening everything.  


“Fine. Dreaming,” Levi mutters darkly with a faraway and unfamiliar voice, reeling against the sickness that settles defiantly in his stomach, shrugging out from under Erwin’s grip. Instantly Levi senses the way Erwin retreats from the contact. He flinches inwardly but he cannot take it back, so he lies there stupidly, ashamed of his weakness. His face burns in the dark.  


“What was it?”  


The question is simple, without judgment, but Levi balks from it anyway. He yearns to hide, to draw into himself until he can get a grip, until he can be sure of what he will do and say. He is still struggling to catch his breath, stomach churning and the world not quite feeling real again yet, and he opens his mouth to tell Erwin he can’t even remember and instead he says in a tight voice, “You died.”  


He blinks, grimances, and considers his own words, the truth his brain had discovered against his conscious will. He swallows hard and frowns into the dark. He breathes through his nose, long and slow, and the warped image of the nightmare regurgitates into the forefront of his mind from the cesspool it had retreated into.  
“It took your damn arm and you died.”  


Levi lies there, chest heaving, stunned at his own answer. He considers it numbly and finds this, too, to be the truth, in the same innate, unconscious way a man might suddenly find himself reciting poetry he once knew in his childhood.  


Erwin is quiet and Levi knows he is considering this. He’s said too much. What must it take, what feeling, to be possessed by a thrashing nightmare about the death of a comrade? More than friendly companionship? Maybe not. Maybe so, though, and Levi can feel the way Erwin mulls this over himself. There is a puzzle piece with Levi’s nightmare printed across it, and a puzzle piece with the nights they’ve spent in this room, and for Erwin to push them together would bring into light a picture of truth neither of them could hide from. It’s quiet for an agonizing moment before Erwin speaks.  


“It did take my arm,” he offers softly, barely voices, and Levi’s heart jags out a strange pattern in his chest. “But I’m here.”  


Levi parts his lips to respond, closes them again. He can’t find a word to say. Part of him thrashes with a desperate urge to defend, to cast away the comfort, to tell Erwin not to flatter himself like this, but what a grand lie, and if he were to utter it Levi knows that not even his skilled deception could hide that truth from Erwin, hovering so close. He swallows again, frowns harder.  


“Stay that way.”  


Levi’s mind has barely formed the words for consideration before he’s casting them imprudently into the space between them, low and tepid, but brusquely genuine. He bites down on the inside of his lip and grimaces at himself, at his own shaking voice, resenting it though he knows even now he would say it again, again in an instant because it is the truth and that is what they tell to each other, simple truths. He stares at the ceiling. Erwin is staring at him in the darkness, propped up on one arm, and Levi can just barely make out the knit eyebrows, the intensity in Erwin’s eyes, the worry- Levi twitches in an aborted impulse to turn away, to protect himself.  


He parts his lips to speak again, to say anything, but Erwin beats him to action. Without warning gentle fingertips make contact with Levi’s skin, considering the arch of his cheekbone, trailing their way to the shell of his ear and drifting down over the scarp of his jaw. Erwin’s fingers ghost the skin of his neck and prick the hairs there to life. Levi’s stomach churns darkly and his breath hitches in the back of his throat. He knits his eyebrows and turns, peers into Erwin’s eyes to find him defenseless, and looking into them Levi’s own careful bulwark falters.  
“Tell me if this bothers you,” Erwin murmurs, and for the first time since their meeting, in all the time Levi has known him, Erwin’s voice is not undaunted. A tremor slips through like a spy and finds Levi, impresses upon him the understanding that Erwin comprehends the irresolution of the moment but is touching him anyway, touching him because it is worth enough to risk everything else.  


Finally, Erwin has pushed out in the gray, unknown waters between them. He has taken the step Levi had sworn he would not, has crossed the line Levi has edged along for weeks, for longer, perhaps. Erwin blinks at Levi in the darkness and Levi knows they both understand this- if Levi draws back now he will be safe, Erwin will falter, will be rendered exposed with nowhere to hide, with nothing to do but admit the truth of his heart. There is no demand for Levi to join him here.  


“We’re not going to do that,” Levi breathes after a long moment, thoughts spinning wide and away from him, reckless in this decision. Erwin’s scent overwhelms him, his warmth draws him in, and he can retain his eloquence but he cannot control his hand, which jerks out for Erwin and finds him right there, close, grips loosely into the fabric of the shirt over Erwin’s chest, over his beating heart. The contact is overwhelming, reality-shifting. Again and again, Erwin is warm beneath his fingers.  


“Do what?” Erwin presses softly, the tips of his fingers gracing the side of Levi’s cheek, and the question is an unspoken offering- the last chance for Levi to volte-face, to pull himself together and slip the guard back up. Levi steps over that wall instead, leaving it shattered to pieces, and blinks into the dark until Erwin’s eyes come back into focus. When he speaks again it’s with a steel certainty, harsh so Erwin can feel how he means it. He wades into the gray water to join Erwin there.  


“Pretend.”  


Erwin’s warm breath finds Levi’s lips across the inches between them and they revel in the nearness for a long moment, breathing together as Erwin’s touch becomes surer against Levi’s neck, as Levi’s fist closes more firmly against Erwin’s chest, until Levi can feel the steady heartbeat, quick and strong under his fingers.  


Through the space their noses brush, tip to tip, and Levi can almost feel the phantom touch of Erwin’s lips, impossibly close. The kiss is a hair's-width away but neither of them tilt into it, not yet, instead balancing here on the edge of contact as if they have not already bounded miles past the line, into this shared, unmapped territory. Maybe it is not for a lack of certainty that they hesitate here, Levi thinks distantly and with a wild mind, but for the sake of relishing it, for the sake of closing their eyes and savouring the way they can tease such closeness, heat billowing in their chests and electrifying their fingertips; for the sake of taking a moment to revel in each other here because they can finally afford to.  


And then, finally, finally, compelled by a dark and wrenching need, Levi closes the precious space and their lips brush together. It is electric. They’ve barely touched when they are dipping back in, slipping deeper, slipping into a proper kiss, slow and tender and indulgent. Dizziness blurs Levi’s mind as their mouths find each other in the darkness, breathness disorientation. Erwin brushes a thumb against Levi’s jaw as their lips slot together, guides with a gentle pressure to the back of his neck, drawing him closer. Levi’s breath is stolen from his lungs and when they break only barely, he struggles to find enough of it to carry his words.  


“Stay,” he manages senselessly, drawing his brows further and tightening his grip on Erwin’s chest before pressing their lips together again, and this is the only word he can find to explain this desperate feeling boring into him, the sickening aftertaste of the nightmare, though it makes no sense, no damn sense at all. His fervent hand finds Erwin’s shoulder as they breathe hungry kisses into each other’s mouths, fingers toying the place where Erwin’s hot skin turns to bandages, and slides back to Erwin’s firm chest, over his heart.  


“I’m right here,” Erwin mouths against Levi’s lips and Levi can’t care enough to stop the groan that spills from him and into Erwin, kissing him again with a new urgency, a headier need. Levi slides his leg forward until it finds Erwin’s and presses into him, shamelessly seeking the warmth of his contact, and Erwin presses back. For the first time their tongues dip together and a dark exhilaration thrills up Levi’s spine, tightens his throat. The notion of restraint still exists somewhere in him, distant and aware, but he spurns it willingly for the prize of Erwin’s kiss, taking and taking and letting himself feel every instant, skin on fire and mind untenanted.  


Time loses meaning in the same way it has for every one of the nights he's spent here, nights spent studying the shape of the untouchable. They touch here now, touch and taste and breathe together until a tug against Levi’s undershirt comes, gentle but firm, bare knuckles brushing against the strip of skin between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his pants and burning there. Levi is craning up and together they are pushing themselves to sit, blindly pulling the shirt over Levi’s head. His mind is buzzing and empty and Erwin’s warm hand is drifting to new places, across Levi’s bare shoulders and chest like he’s discovering something precious and worth touching there, like this.  


At an indescribable point something shifts, heavy and critical, and this is when Levi pushes himself up again, clambering with none of his usual grace because he can’t care less for form now, not as he brings himself to straddle Erwin and presses exhilaratingly against his hips- Erwin, who tilts his head back against the headboard to find Levi’s eyes. Their gazes catch and lock and they stare, feverish in need, Levi hardly recognizing himself positioned over Erwin like this, hardly recognizing the prone shape of the commanding officer below him. Levi grips the headboard with hands on either side of Erwin’s head, and reels against the unfamiliarity, Erwin’s twin place in this nomansland a private comfort.  


His body, on fire, bleeds into his mind until it has usurped control, commanding him until he is rocking his hips against Erwin with a low twist of pleasure, biting back unfamiliar sounds as they tangle in his throat. Erwin’s hand finds the hem of Levi’s pants and clutches them, presses down on his hip bone, guiding him into the movement. Erwin makes a sound, soft and low, and the thrill that streaks through Levi is staggering.  


Consumed, he moves quickly and thoughtlessly, clamberning for the edge, racing there, and the core of him heats, the familiar lurching twist in him deepening. Levi is blinded by the feeling and slipping into something stronger, deeper, when suddenly Erwin’s grip steadies his motions, holds his hips still in the space until he has no choice but to break from the misted pleasure of the moment.  


“What?” he rasps, voice breaking unfortunately on the word. His heart is slamming against his ribs, his throat is dry, and his mind blissfully empty. His hungry eyes find Erwin’s and a jolt of discomfort jerks him from the mindlessness.  


Erwin is looking at him like he’s looking at something else; a delicate flower, maybe, a shooting star, something out of poetry, and this time the twist in Levi’s stomach isn’t hot pleasure, it’s something foriegn and unsettling. For the first time in his life Levi suddenly struggles to keep eye contact with Erwin, and he resents him for it.  


“Slow,” Erwin implores with this new doting gaze, thumb pressing tenderly against Levi’s hipbone in a way that suddenly feels intrusive, deceiving. “I want to look at you.”  


Levi catches Erwin’s wrist in his hand and shakes his head a little, the curtain of his hair flicking in front of his eyes. He bites back a scoff, working his jaw and fighting the streaks of mild panic when he can find no words to explain the complication of what is happening in his mind. Everything is unraveling rapidly and without reason, except there is a reason, something large and unavoidable and blurred around the edges but there. They’ve bounded past the point of no complete return but maybe they can clamber back to something like normal in time if they stop now, stop here before it’s too late. It suddenly becomes starkly clear that Levi can’t give himself away, not to Erwin, not like this. Maybe he can give Erwin his body but he can’t bear himself to Erwin the way Erwin had him, and maybe he can’t give his body to Erwin without that, too.  


“Levi,” Erwin murmurs like a longtime lover, slipping his hand from Levi’s grip to find his face. His fingertips are soft and warm and tempting, but Levi fights the want to lean into the touch for the instinct that jerks him away instead, the grave exhilaration of fight or flight, survival. As the ice cold clarity seeps further into his bones there is no way to unrealize, to turn back and pretend he hasn’t understood the way he can’t do this.  


Levi wrenches away, clambering off as gracelessly as he had climbed over, stumbling out of the bed and away from Erwin and his honey words and his poetic eyes. The floor is cold under his feet and he suddenly feels exposed, shirtless and breathless, half hard and ruffled in the middle of a room that doesn’t belong to him, that never truly had.  


“What’s wrong?”  


Erwin is breathless and still tangled in the blankets and the moment and he is slow for it; Levi takes the opportunity and snatches his clothes off the end of the bed, drawing a deep breath and steadying his raging mind, steeling himself against the tumult in his chest, pressing it down and away, down and away until it is just a dull throb. He turns back to Erwin’s shape on the bed, tense, vulnerable. Levi’s voice comes out thick but it is steady.  


“This is a mistake. You’ll thank me later.”  


Erwin is propped up on his arm, staring at Levi in the dark. Levi pretends not to know this as he tugs his shirt back on, begins to re-clip his harness even though he’ll take it off again when he reaches his quarters.  


“Levi…”  


But he won’t stay, he won’t let himself be backed into a corner and questioned, and he makes for the door the instant he’s finished strapping on his second boot. Erwin’s eyes burn into the back of him as he opens the door and stalks out but he doesn’t try and stop him; maybe he knows him well enough to understand that he can’t.  


Levi finds his way back to his quarters without a single thought, and when he opens the door the room is small and cold. He can still feel Erwin’s careful fingertips on his waist and taste him on his lips and he fights the tug at the back of his throat, the ache in his chest.  


He had been mistaken, he doesn’t take off his harness when he gets back to his room, he doesn’t take anything off; he lies in his bed and stares at the ceiling until sunlight sifts through the window and makes shadows of his furniture. 

4\. On Purpose

  


This time is not like the others. 

  


This time Levi comes unguarded, gliding to a stop before the door like a phantom of the night, jaw set. His heart flutters like a bird in the cage of his ribs and something dances on the tip of his tongue, presses the back of his teeth, an apology, maybe, or maybe an excuse. Its strength is undeniable but its identity a mystery, and it weighs down in Levi’s mouth, undefined words loaded like a cannon and ready to launch despite their lack of definition.  


He knocks on the door despite not knowing what to say, and the twinge in his chest that tells him to run flares to life, begging, begging, and he ignores it. He doesn’t know what he needs but he knows what he wants and that’s enough, it must be, because he has come to realize in the three days since the last time he had slept here that he might not be blessed with such understanding until it’s all too late.  


They’ve interacted a handful of agonizing times since then, in the form of orders given without eye contact and knuckles brushing, burning, with the passing of memos. It’s been unbearable; it’s been ridiculous is what it’s been, and Levi thinks he might have known better than to believe there was ever any option but this, in the end.  


_Fuck it, fuck it. _  
__

____

____

The thought streaks wildly, resentfully through his head as sways on the spot, heart in his throat and brows drawn hard together. It ricochets around his consciousness, bludgeons all else from consideration, evaporates when Erwin opens the door.  


He doesn’t say anything and Levi hadn’t been expecting him to. Instead Erwin blinks at Levi in surprise too mild, with an expression that betrays a pre-existent inkling confirmed by Levi’s being here. They both hover for a moment, and then, soundlessly, Erwin steps aside. It’s something between a command and an invitation, and Levi accepts either- both- crossing into the room with his cloak swishing about his heels. He turns to face Erwin as the commander closes the door, and they stare across the quiet space to each other like they had stared in the door frame.  


“...Do you want to talk?”  


The question comes wrapped in formality and Levi resents it. He jerks his head no and Erwin absorbs this, nods, glances down, musing. His hand is still on the doorknob. It’s still and tense and the room sweats with something aimless and claustrophobic. The weight of the unsaid is too much to bear, even between two weathered soldiers. And then Levi speaks without checking the words on their way out of his mouth, because his heart is hammering again and he’s here, and they’ve come too far to be stopped again by his own resistance to this.  


“You can look at me,” Levi says, and Erwin stares at him. The words carry twice as much weight as they seem to and Erwin understands because he always understands. Levi follows the delicate bob of Erwin’s Adam’s apple as he swallows, as it dips back up into place. It sets his chest on fire. Erwin parts his lips, closes them, and parts them again.  


“....Are you… sure?” he presses gently, seeming to choose his words with careful selection, and there again is the gild of formality that sets Levi’s teeth on edge. Levi is the one who’s done this to them, cast them into this strange place, but he resents Erwin for the way he brings it to life with his words because it’s easier to cast this blame than face that truth.  


“Erwin.”  


_Don’t make me beg, _is what he wants to say, but that is begging in and of itself, Erwin’s name alone is nearly begging already, and by the shifting blues in his eyes Levi knows Erwin understands this too. Levi gazes across the space, watching Erwin hard, imploring with every fibre of his being, begging despite himself, begging him with his eyes to take his damn hand off the doorknob. The last time he had been here Levi had been half undressed but he had been half as bare; now, standing here with his fingertips ghosting Erwin’s desk, starkly out of place in the middle of the room, he is naked.  
__

____

____

Erwin looks back steadily, and then, with a sense of quiet acceptance, he lets go of the door to turn himself fully to Levi. His empty sleeve shifts against him, waving its reminder to Levi that it started this mess, had cast them into this place, had dragged them through hell with the temptation of something too good to be real, too precious to be toyed with. Heart hammering against the inside of him, stomach fluttering, Levi wrenches free of the oppressive need to mirror Erwin as the commander swallows again.  


When Erwin crosses the room to Levi he leaves the shell of his station behind him at the door. He’s no commander now, not as he approaches Levi, as he comes to a graceful stop, so suddenly close and not close like a superior or a soldier but as someone whose lips have pressed against Levi’s neck, someone whose hands have grazed his bare skin and whose tongue has dipped into his mouth.  


Despite his nearness, Erwin doesn’t reach out. He stands there so the tips of their boots are nearly touching, with just enough space between their chests to accommodate a good book. Levi looks up and into Erwin’s eyes to find a clear tranquility; he feels his own expression soften, there is nothing else he can do but this.  


“I’m glad you came back,” Erwin breathes, and this time when Levi feels the warm glance of Erwin’s fingertips against his cheek, he’s ready.  


“I had no choice.”  


Levi closes his eyes despite the way it casts him into vulnerability; it’s a fallacy to pretend he isn’t already there. The phantom touch ghosts across Levi’s skin, following the angle of his cheekbone, pressing into the start of his hair and then slipping to his ear, his neck. Levi releases the breath held captive in his lungs; it had been an unconscious kidnapping.  


When his eyes flutter open he finds the expression there again on Erwin’s face, the same look that he had discovered the night he had lost his nerve, himself. It’s reverence, and he is forced by the delicate draw of Erwin’s eyebrows and deep pooling blue of his eyes to face the way in which he does not feel worthy to be looked at like this. He does falter now, eyes flickering from Erwin’s, finding the green of his commander’s bolo and locking onto it like it holds some revolutionary answer to some important question. Something in him itches to reach out and find Erwin but something between his mind and his hands is broken and it’s all he can do to stand there and stare at Erwin’s tie like a fool.  


Erwin presses a kiss into his hair, gentle, unassuming, but Levi’s chest constricts around his skipping heart. Another finds his head, then another, and another, until Levi is tilting his head up, eyes closed tightly, dabbing his tongue against his lips with a coil in his stomach. The ache is back, the warm twist below the butterflies, and it’s shameful, alarming, how quickly Erwin brings this alive in him.  


Erwin’s fingertips slide back until it is his hand that cups Levi’s face, careful and tender, thumb stroking small patterns into Levi’s cheekbone. Levi’s breath hitches and he opens his eyes to find Erwin’s again, the tension flooding from him as if Erwin is extracting it with his fingertips. Eyebrows twitching with some distracted cousin of irritation, Levi frowns, wets his lips again.  
“Erwin,” he begins huskily, a placeholder as he searches for words to explain the way he can’t maintain this near-touching, but Erwin catches his own name with his lips, kissing into Levi’s mouth with such care that it hurts the raw place in his chest. It’s delicate, chaste, and as soon as it’s begun Erwin is already pulling back again to give Levi space he had thought he wanted half a week prior. But Levi follows this time, pressing up on his toes to slip his hands around the frame of Erwin’s face, catching him and then guiding him back down again, back to his lips.  
Levi kisses firmly but concedes to Erwin’s style, slow and sweet. For the first time he lets the truth bleed freely into the press of their lips, the truth that it means something, because it had always meant something, even if he had gone too quickly to let Erwin feel it before. They sway on the spot as Erwin wraps his arm around Levi, gently pressing him close, drawing them together. Erwin tastes the same as before, like gunpowder and mint and tea, intoxicating, safe. Levi’s hands slip past the arch of Erwin’s cheekbones, until his fingers find the coarse blonde hair behind Erwin’s ears, lace through and hold him there so he can take his time kissing, every press of their lips feeling like the first time done over again.  


When they break apart, breathless, noses brushing, Erwin is smiling only just, and Levi’s eyes flicker down to his lips to catch it, to revel in the little upturn. Erwin brushes a knuckle against the corner of Levi’s mouth, grazes Levi’s lip with his thumb and traces the shape, studying the contact like he’s memorizing it. Levi parts his lips half unconsciously for him, something electric thrilling through his veins. Erwin dips down again to Levi’s lips, and this time a touch of the hunger has returned to them both, a sense of breathless, dizzy indulgence.  


Levi is the one to tug at his own clothes this time, as tongues slip into the kiss and Erwin walks them backwards until Levi is pressed against the wall. Erwin catches the back of Levi’s head in time, tangling in his hair and stopping him from cracking it against the wooden framework and it’s a ridiculous thing to set a lurch off in Levi’s stomach but it happens despite the absurdity, and he leans into the feeling, tilting his head up and unclasping his cloak from his neck so that it crumples to the floor. He begins to unbutton the top of his shirt and Erwin’s fingers join him in the effort, the task feeling more critical by the passing second. Erwin’s fingers brush a steady trail against Levi’s scarred chest as his shirt comes slowly undone; he arches into the touch.  


They move through a dream as they free themselves and each other of clothing, as fingertips against the hard plastic of buttons and starched material of uniforms becomes fingertips on skin, trailing grazes and caresses venturing to new places. It’s strange, to find themselves with so much unseen and unexplored when they’ve been so close, so agonizingly close, for so many years. Now they are drifting free, somehow both so familiar and so foreign.  


They find themselves back in the bed, the entirety of their uniforms scattered across the floor, rendered pointless, devoid of dignity. Levi’s head sinks back into the pillow and he fixates on the cracks in the wooden panelling of the ceiling as Erwin’s mouth drags hot patterns along his throat, his collarbone. When he fucks Levi knows where to put his hands, how to use his mouth, what to say and when not to say anything, how to move, how to get there and finish up and pull himself together again like nothing had happened, but suddenly now, here, he feels naive, virginal. His heart slams his ribs and he resists the lurch again, the same one that had overcome him last time, pulled him out of the danger, back to a place he could stand his ground. Now, laid out under Erwin, arms strewn out and with Erwin’s firm grip against his naked hips, he is lost.  


“Levi.” Erwin’s voice finds him through the heavy daze and Levi cranes his head up to find Erwin’s eyes, to latch onto something familiar in this foreign land. Erwin’s voice is husky, his face flushed and his hair ruffled, but the stern authority of command remains, a firm foundation despite the chaotic tide of whatever this is.  


“Mm,” Levi responds on a breath through his nose because he doesn’t trust his voice to steady, not this time. He doesn’t trust words either; besides, he has none. His throat is tight and his stomach writhes and all he can tell about how he feels is that he’s never felt it before.  


Hovering above Levi’s hips where he had abandoned a trail of slow kisses, Erwin considers him a moment, his jaw working patiently with thought. And then he shifts up, pushing up to position himself directly over Levi so their noses once again graze, so that their breath mingles and Erwin’s thigh presses gently between Levi’s legs, drawing a breathless intake from him.  


Erwin’s eyes flicker between Levi’s for a long moment and Levi looks back obstinately. He knows what he must look like, hair stuck across his forehead, an intoxicated expression painted across his face. He looks back up at Erwin defiantly from this edge, a place beyond recovery. Erwin blinks down at him, then, with incredible slowness, leans down and presses a soft, chaste kiss against Levi’s lips. He tilts up into it, heart flaring in a storm of butterflies. When they part, Erwin’s voice is low and gentle.  


“It’s just me.”  


Levi studies him long and hard, heart roaring in his ears and breath catching with every intake. And then, just as slowly as the kiss had been, he nods.  


And it is in this way that Levi is undone, piece by piece and touch by touch, not by scratches and bites and mindless thrusts but by gentle murmurs against sensitive skin, measured restraint and deliberate touches and words that mean something. Levi fights until he doesn’t, until something in him wears down to breaking and he allows Erwin to pull the rest of his shield away, to touch him in sacred places with sacred intention, in unapologetic ways they cannot run from. With a careful hand and conscious strokes Erwin coaxes Levi toward the edge of the abyss until Levi makes untethered sounds he cannot deny come morning, until there is no room for misinterpretation. When he presses into him Erwin is warm and full, and with each patient thrust, with each insisted utterance of low, loving words, too gracious for Levi though Erwin says them anyway, Erwin breaks apart the shell that holds Levi together until he doesn’t know his own name, until he is adrift with nothing to cling to but Erwin, Erwin, Erwin, holding him open. When Levi comes it is blinding, like nothing he has experienced, and he grasps onto Erwin with the desperation of a drowning man, gasping into his neck and catching a wild glimpse of heaven.  


The euphoria lingers until they have fallen into place beside each other again, staring into each other’s eyes across the small space, through the dark, as they had done moments before they had first kissed. Now they are naked in more ways than one, searching fingers brushing against the edges and slopes of each other, breathing in unison.  


Levi is lost and found. His mind is a whirl but a distant one, full of things that can be dealt with tomorrow, or maybe next week, or maybe not at all. For now there is just this, this breathing heavy into the dark, floating here with Erwin, gently toying the bandage that covers the place where his arm had once been, reveling in them both being here, cherishing each breath that leaves Erwin’s lungs like a treasure, like he had the night in the infirmary when he had touched him and felt the proof. Now, in the dark, flooded with bliss, Levi edges on the understanding of the way Erwin looks at him.  


“Stay the night,” Erwin bids quietly and Levi huffs, almost laughs, kisses him shamelessly. Erwin is warm and smells of gunpowder and mint and himself. Levi’s own room waits for him somewhere, cold and distant, and in vain.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed! I'll never get tired of writing these guys.


End file.
